As I mentioned, the weekend was pretty quiet. I missed out on a beer garden on Friday night and a thing or two during the day on Saturday. Thankfully I escaped school at dead on 4pm though, so my Saturday night wasn't completely ruined. My new friend Tomoko had invited me to a BBQ at her house and had even arranged to pick me up at Paone, as her house is a little way out of Ako. Unfortunately, it started bucketing with rain at just before 4pm and despite my raincoat, I got drenched! I managed to find Tomoko but was feeling pretty crap thanks to the rain, so told her I needed to go home and have a shower first. I felt a bit bad about that as she'd been waiting just for me. She didn't seem to mind though, and arranged to pick me up a little later in the arvo.

The party was pretty fun, overall. My friend Devin, another ALT, was also there, and I remember thinking how rare the situation was. Not only because we had been invited into a Japanese house, but because we were also having a party in one and there were two of us gaijin there at the same time ;) A very rare occurrence in Ako! ;) And on the topic of Japanese houses, I was really glad of the opportunity to finally be able to bust out my full collection of Japanese house culture! The shoes thing is completely natural now (I'll probably still do it when I return to Australia, hehe), but I got to say a few new things - the customary 'ojama shimasu' (excuse me for disturbing you) as you enter the house and 'tsumarani mono desu ga' (it's a trifling thing, but ...) as you give the little gift you're supposed to when you visit someone's house. Very cool!

Tomoko's house was really nice, too. It was an older style house, but very well made and still beautiful. Perhaps the best part was that the large tatami room that we sat in to eat had wonderful bamboo sliding doors that opened up to reveal a small verandah, a beautiful little garden and the greenery of the mountain just beyond. Fantastic! Thanks to the rain streaming down outside the window, we couldn't do a BBQ after all though. Instead, Tomoko's mum cooked up a storm of takoyaki and yakisoba - yum! As we sat and ate, I met Tomoko's family, who were all there. She has a younger brother who studies at the local Welfare University and a younger sister who seems to be either in late elementary or early junior high school. Her brother's girlfriend and some of his friends were also there, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of what people that age are like (again, a very rare opportunity for me). Basically the same as my high school students, haha, but without the strict rules. So they all had died hair, pierced ears, grungey/revealing clothes and so on.

Finally, her parents were pretty cool too. Her mum is very kind and an awesome cook, and her dad was a total riot. He was pretty drunk and would continually call out 'Sensei mo!', grab Devin's or my hand, and ask us all kinds of bizarre questions. I was ok to translate initially but as he got more and more drunk I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, hahaha. So poor Tomoko had to act as drunken speech translator, hehe. The whole party was a really good chance to practise my Japanese, actually. Any situation where you have someone who can't speak English and someone who can is excellent, because you can try your best to understand and communicate with the former while having the latter as backup. You can learn heaps that way, I think. Communicating with people who can't speak English tends to be fruitless from the point of view of learning anything new - it's hard to learn when you can't get an explanation of what has been said if you don't understand it!

At just after 7pm, Devin had to leave and so I decided to head off too. Tomoko seemed disappointed but I didn't want her mum to have to make yet another trip out into Ako later that night just to drop me off. She probably would have (she seems to have infinite patience, as she waited around for Tomoko for over an hour last Tuesday night when we decided to go out for dinner after the Japanese class) but that's beside the point! Back at the ranch I didn't want to call it a night yet, so gave Kazu a call. He wasn't doing anything so we whacked on our raincoats and headed down to an izakaya on the main street of Ako for a later dinner. After that we spent some time searching for a new bar to go to, but lucked out. In the end we wound up at Selfish, a 'safe' snack bar that we know, where thanks to the rain, we were pretty much the only customers. After a few drinks and some karaoke, we called it a night.

My Sunday and Monday were really quiet. I was exhausted after the long week so slept in very late on Sunday. When I got up, I finished Assassin's Creed, went to see Minato-san for dinner and then borrowed some movies from GEO. On Monday I installed my last new game, Bio Shock. It's an incredible game and admittedly I spent most of the day playing it. I did a few chores in the late afternoon and grabbed some dinner at Kappa Sushi. I got a 'hisashiburi!' from one of the staff, which was nice, as I hadn't been there for several weeks. And that was my weekend done. Pretty quiet, but given how busy I'd been, it was great to have a good rest.